May, 1919 os ! 115 
MALCOLM PLAYFATR ANDERSON 
By MELVILLE B, ANDERSON 
WITH PORTRAIT 
HE SUBJECT of this sketch, and the son of its author, was born at Irving- 
ton, a suburb of Indianapolis, April 6, 1879. His parents were both of 
school and college training, his father being at that time a professor at 
Butler College. From his twelfth to his fourteenth year Malcolm was at school 
in Germany, where he went with his mother, his elder brother, and the two 
younger children of the family. Here he learned little from books, but his con- 
tact with the German schoolboy was perhaps of some educative value. He and 
his brother found their survival among their German companions to depend in 
a degree upon force of arms and fists. Malcolm was a serious boy, not especi- 
ally combative, but he soon learned not to fear a ‘‘German militarist’’ of twice 
his size. Within school his energy appears to have been employed largely in 
passive resistance to the admirably organized system of forcing a knowledge of 
Latin grammar upon the unwilling mind. Outside school his resistance to evil, 
if less passive, was perhaps equally passionate. He left Germany with some 
knowledge of the language and with no great love for the German schoolboy, 
who appeared to him to be both a bully and a talebearer. 
Meanwhile his father had been called to the chair of English literature at 
Stanford University. Returning home, Malcolm came first under the tuition 
of Miss Irene Hardy, who did much to repair the devastation wrought by the 
German method upon his soul, which had been driven inward upon itself. Miss 
Hardy thought the case interesting, and found a way of drawing him out. Lat- 
er on he studied under two teachers to whom he owed much, Mr. Frank Cramer 
and Mr. (now Professor) J. O. Snyder. In due time he naturally took the 
course (in Zoology) at Stanford University, where he received his degree in 
1904. ; 
From his fifteenth year on, he had been a member of several collecting ex- 
peditions, in which he early had the advantage of the companionship and exam- 
ple of such men as Ray Lyman Wilbur, Dane Coolidge, and W. W. Price. Be- 
fore receiving his degree he had tramped thousands of miles, collecting and 
studying the flora and fauna of Arizona and California, and had gone to Alaska 
with Mr. Stone. He became a member of the Cooper Ornithological Club in 
1901, and, though circumstances prevented him from devoting himself specially 
to Ornithology, he was to the last in correspondence with that Society. Dr. 
Grinnell informs me that Malcolm has to his credit the following titles: 
“Birds of the Siskiyou Mountains, California: a Problem in Distribution” [with 
Joseph Grinnell] (Proc. Acad. Nat. Sci. Phila., January, 1903, pp. 4-15). 
“A List of Birds from the Santa Cruz Mountains, California” [with Hubert O. Jen- 
kins] (Condor, v, November, 1903, pp. 153-155). 
That is of course a very slender showing, as he would have been the first 
to acknowledge had he considered the matter worth speaking of. I know that 
he keenly regretted his inability through lack of time to do more. But his note- 
books prove him to have been a careful observer and an eager collector of birds. 
in 1904 he was chosen by the London Zoological Society to conduct the Duke 
of Bedford’s Exploration of Eastern Asia. As he was under the immediate 
